


cooking skills

by 500shadesofblue



Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen, and another one!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 11:01:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19828807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/500shadesofblue/pseuds/500shadesofblue





	cooking skills

Life gets back to the new normal. Hunting, again, and cooking a lot of their own meals over the fire, mostly, massive megafauna taken down with utter ease in a group of four.

(Valentine is _incredibly_ grateful for Makino’s constant no-strings-attached supply of fruits and vegetables whenever they sneak back for brief stops in the village or else she’s pretty sure they’d all have scurvy.)

She laments her merely serviceable cooking skills. She’s absorbed the bare minimum from simple observation - Makino is a fantastic cook (though her baking is only passable) and it’s impossible not to learn _something_ from so many hours in the kitchen, asking questions whenever the fancy strikes her - but she’s afraid that most of her knowledge comes from Before, even fuzzy and instinctual as it is. Knowledge enough to be aware that for passable cooking, all you really need is attentiveness, the bare minimum of knowledge, and a good head on your shoulders.

That, and a willingness to learn and improve. But then again, that goes for pretty much everything.

(She’s not sure she can claim any common sense, but she’s got the rest.)

They liberate a huge frying pan from Dadan (a much more palatable move than taking anything from Makino’s kitchen), and Valentine tends to use it more often than not when they’re not just roasting their catch over the fire on a spit. (Which has its own merits, to be entirely honest. Any bite of juicy, freshly fire-roasted meat tends to be delicious, even with the gaminess of everything they catch around here.)

Ace, surprisingly, takes well to cooking, expression twisting into relaxed neutrality as he watches the rice or potatoes (or whatever variety of the filling basics that they’ve taken from Dadan) sizzling in the pan, poking at it with the spatula (again, liberated from Dadan, because the first time they tried this, Luffy enthusiastically went to stir the potatoes with a branch scooped off the ground and despite her lunging attempts, she failed to stop him and- well, things imploded, the way they usually do when she can’t manage to cut Luffy off at the pass).

Ace has got all of Luffy’s enthusiasm translated into a more intent interest (he likes to eat, he likes food, therefore: creating his own food is a good idea) and none of Luffy’s utterly disastrous recklessness around anything and everything cooking-related, though he burns his eager fingers (and undercooks the meat) plenty of times before he begrudgingly learns his lesson. Ace is impatient, but he’s got a good head for tactics, which translates strangely fine to cooking. He’ll never be winning any awards, but by the time he hits adulthood, Valentine’s reasonably sure he’ll be able to properly feed himself without being poisoned.

...She doesn’t want to think about Luffy anywhere near uncooked food.

Sabo doesn’t have much of an instinct for cooking, but he always ends up being pretty good at whatever he puts his mind to. He has zero intuitive grasp of how to season and sear things (whatever he made at first was either ludicrously under or oversalted - sprinkled with rock salt stolen from the massive storeroom barrel at Dadan’s - and unevenly cooked, bloodily raw and charred in turns), but as time goes on, Sabo applies himself with persistent determination (as he does with all things), and his acute desire to learn dictates that eventually he develops a serviceable schema for seasoning and basic cooking methods. He, like Ace, won’t ever be a master chef - maybe _especially_ won’t be a master chef - but he won’t burn the meat. (Often.) That’s the most important thing.

Valentine resolves to get her promised cooking lessons from Makino as soon as it’s safe to be back in the village for extended periods of time. She’s the best out of the three, but that’s really not saying much.


End file.
